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A Brief Historical Survey of the Anatomophysiology of the Human Body (from “humani corporis fabrica” to “humani corporis machina”)

Musitelli S and Bertozzi MA

The ancient Greek and Latin anatomo-physiologists from Hippocrates (460-390 BC) to Galen (129-199 AD), as well as all the subsequent ones till the 17^th century conceived every body of every living animal, man included, as consisting of well organized “parts”, each of which in its turn was not only characterized by four “qualities” (attracting, retaining, transforming and expelling “virtues” or “faculties”) but also by the difference between “similar” and “dissimilar parts”. This fundamental difference that was a faint intuition of the difference between our “tissues” and “organs” was foreshadowed by Hippocrates, improved and perfected by Aristotle (384-322 BC), inherited by Galen and by all the subsequent anatomo-physiologists till Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s (1608-1679) and his disciple’s foundation of the so-called “iatromechanic School” that is nothing but the application of the “Galilean scientific revolution” to the field of Medicine in general and of Anatomo-physiology in particular: All the Hippocratic, Aristotelian and Galenic “qualities” and “virtues” that although seemed to explain everything, nonetheless explained nothing at all were replaced by the “quantities” that can at last be expressed mathematically! Infact neither the “virtues/faculties nor the “qualities” can be “quantified” and this is why none of the pre-Galilean scientists could ever enunciate any “scientific law” in the modern sense of the word.